#Authorinterview: Sourabh Mukherjee

12:18:00 AM

A month back I got "Shadows of death" to read and to follow it with an interview with Sourabh Mukherjee. I missed on the review of this awesome crime thriller ( will share soon) , here is the interview meanwhile-

What was the moment/ incident that triggered the passion for
writing in you ?

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I
have never really written for a purpose – it is just something I love to do. In
my early childhood, I would spend hours writing, as well as making
illustrations for my own stories. A number of my poems were published in
children’s magazines back in the day. I continued to write through my teenage
and later in college.

I kept writing in office magazines for a couple of
years, but the demands of my career as an Information Technology professional
and my travels across the world soon left me with very little time and creative
energy to write fiction. I started churning out technical whitepapers and
non-fictional articles that got published in business and technology journals
of repute.

However, as I travelled across the world, I grew as
a person getting to observe people from widely varying cultural backgrounds and
to study their emotions, their thoughts, their behaviour from various
perspectives. And stories began to grow all over again.

I started my fiction writing career with the
popular e-books Nargis Through my Summersand Loves Lost. Nargis
Through my Summers and Loves Lost were released in paperback as Romance Shorts. Romance
Shorts is currently available for purchase in the US, Canada and UK. The Indian
edition will be released this month.

My short stories in various genres were also
published in international e-zines like Under the Bed, Fiction and Romance from
FictionMagazine.com. I won the Golden Pen Award in the Monsoon Romance Contest
organized by Sulekha.com in 2014, which came as a huge motivation.

And then, In the Shadows of Death was published in
mid December 2015 by Srishti Publishers.

Wow. That is quite a list. What helped you more : your creativity or your practice at
writing ?

I would say, both.

Honestly, I do not follow a fixed routine when it
comes to my writing.

I create a basic structure and chapter outlines and
then I start writing the chapters with the basic premise in sight. And I let
go, letting the sights and the sounds in my mind take over. It is, therefore,
extremely important for me to be in the ‘appropriate’ frame of mind to write. I
need to be in those situations myself. Therefore when I am writing a story,
there are days when I am not in the ‘appropriate’ mood that the work demands,
and I do not write a word.

What I always hear from my readers is that they can
visualize the scenes, and relate to the characters. And now you know why.

Why crime thriller for a debut novel ?

Being an avid reader of crime fiction myself, I have always harboured
an ambition to make my own humble contribution to this genre. The story, of
course, had its germs in my own interests in human psychology and in the
complexities of human relationships, especially in these times of changing
social order.

Also, it does not make me too happy to note that,
whenever we speak of popular detectives in English fiction, we end up naming
characters created by foreign authors. With so much of quality fiction being
written in India in the English language, where is that one pan-Indian
character that is a brand by her or his own right and has instant recall? So, I
asked myself, why not make a humble effort to create one in ACP Agni Mitra?

Do you think that the trend for romance books has declined in
the last few years ?

I do not think so. Indian English writing is still primarily about
Romance, with a handful of exceptions like Ashwin Sanghi, Ravi Subramanian and
Amish, who are exploring alternate genres successfully.

We still have a situation where readers in India go to James
Patterson, Gillian Flynn and Keigo Higashino when they want to read quality
crime fiction.

Quite True. Hope authors like you change that. What is the kind of story that you would never write or want to
be associated with your name ?

I cannot think of any such genre.

If you look at my body of work, I have written a number of
romantic stories in my e-books Nargis Through my Summers and Loves Lost,
available in paperback as Romance Shorts. My short stories published in e-zines
are in genres like Horror, Drama, and Tragedy.

The way I look at this is, I write only
about human relationships. The many ways in which they unravel and manifest
themselves end up creating stories that sometimes excite us, scare us, or make
us sad - leading to corresponding categorization of the stories into genres
like Romance, Horror, Drama or Thriller. But, it's always the complicated and
unpredictable human nature at the core of everything.

When I look at the feedback I have
received so far for In the Shadows of Death, a large number of readers have
been touched by the underlying element of tragedy in the story. My novel is
primarily about our inner devils destroying relationships we value.

When you were creating the character for this book , did you
improvise based on the plot or was it vice versa ?

The characters drive the story.

When I look at my city today, I see a
Kolkata in the cusp of change. Contemporary Kolkatans are from a generation
that is ambitious and ready to embrace 'the good life'. It is a generation
which has seen its parents struggle, yet has barely gone through that struggle
itself. And for many, thereis a
singular focus on fulfilling their own desires and ambitions at any cost. In
the process, Kolkata today is experiencing a significant change in its societal
structure and core ethics of its people. This has been a key motivation behind
my story.

As for the central characters, the investigating officer, ACP Agni Mitra
comes across as an emotional human being dealing with his own personal crisis
and not as an infallible, larger-than-life law enforcement machinery, as the
protagonists are often depicted in stories of this genre. The character of the
serial-killer has several layers and a parallel track throughout the novel in
the form of the voice of the killer provides insights into the dark recesses of
his mind. The novel creates situations where the paths of the investigating officer
and the serial killer cross – not only as a consequence of the murder
investigation, but also at an emotional level.

Are we going to see more of Agni Mitra in coming years ?

I am
currently working on the next Agni Mitra thriller 'The Colours of Passion'
which would be released this year.